As the world’s population grows, there are greater demands placed on the natural environment to feed people – people whose dietary expectations have changed with a greater awareness of how other people live. With this increase in the consumption of animal protein, aquaculture has been portrayed as the latest technological panacea to save the environment, promote economic development (Sachs 2007), and strengthen food security (Godfray et.al. 2010). There is much to recommend sustainable aquaculture, especially when compared to other animal protein sources. Fish in general have a higher feed conversion ratio than beef, pork, or poultry (Steinfeld et.al. 2006). Aquaculture has lower environmental costs in terms of land use and degradation, pollutant emissions, or fresh water and energy consumption (Hall et.al. 2011). Farmed fish are also the fastest growing agricultural sector (between 1970 and 2008), outpacing population growth (FAO 2008:6), with the highest value in the global food trade. In 2008, aquaculture accounted for 45.7% of the global fish production for human consumption, with an estimated value of US$ 98.4 billion (FAO 2010: 18). The bulk of aquaculture production took place in developing countries, with China by far the largest producer (62.3%) of farmed fish.
This growth in aquaculture, however, has been considered by many (Goldburg, Elliot, and Naylor 2001; Pauly 2002) to not be sustainable: economic scale within an ecological system, equitable distribution of resources, and efficient allocation that accounts for natural capital (Costanza and Patten 1995:194). This long-term, ethnographic study will explore the social, economic, and environmental challenges faced by fish farmers in the Yangtze River Delta to better understand how sustainable aquaculture can be promoted among both small and medium scale producers. In a previous study, I found particular conditions that made aquaculture in North Carolina sustainable: an emphasis on freshwater fish, the use of closed recirculating systems, the wider context of information-based environmental governance in the US, and the creation of cooperatives and other socioeconomic organizations that helped farmers employ sustainable practices (Lozada 2012). This study will determine what aspects of this model can encourage Chinese fish farmers to use more sustainable practices.
This research contributes directly to two fields: food studies in China and sustainability. In terms of food studies, aquaculture is an important part of China’s food system, a system that has been under significant pressure and scrutiny (Zhang et.al. 2014). In China, while annual per capita meat consumption increased about 43% from 1981 to 2004, fish products increased 72% (Dong & Fuller, 2010). Yet food security and safety continues to be a significant source of social unrest, as Yan (2012) concludes in his examination of food tampering and social insecurity. Klein (2013) finds that Chinese consumers, producers, and sellers have forged new connections of trust driven by particularistic connections.
In terms of sustainability, this research will focus on social and cultural initiatives that can supplement both government and market approaches. Subasinghe et.al. (2009) assert that what is most needed to make aquaculture sustainable is better management of production by the producers themselves through a combination of good governance and self-regulation – a combination best achieved by expanding the flow of information through social networks of producer associations, consumers and other social groups (see also Pullin et.al. 2007). Smith et.al. (2010) further argue that aquaculture’s tight coupling to ecosystems and dependence on common-pool resources make government policies insufficient in creating incentives for sustainable aquaculture, but there are possibilities in initiatives such as certification and direct sourcing. While there is skepticism among my Chinese colleagues for this approach, they have expressed a willingness to try to implement such an approach.
Preliminary fieldwork conducted in the summers of 2013 and 2014 suggest that Chinese fish farmers do not face the same challenges as the small-scale fish farmers in North Carolina that I studied earlier. Of particular note, aquaculture cooperatives in China do not have the same strengths for promoting sustainability that American ones have (especially market-based tools such as shared purchases of capital-intensive equipment and group certification). Chinese cooperatives do have other features (closer connections to policy makers and enforcers) that may stimulate more widespread sustainable practices. As a result, this study will focus on the connections between local state agencies, cooperatives, producers and consumers. Due to the high visibility in China of food scandals such as the 2008 tainted milk issue, traceability has become an important aspect of food safety in the distribution chain. In China, however, there are inherent problems of trust in technological solutions, making particularistic social networks an important part of food safety strategies. Ethnographic documentation of the commodity chain from producers to consumers may reveal different ways in which trust in ethical and sustainable food producers can be expanded.

While the diasporic nature of overseas Chinese has been explored in a wide range of localities (from Southeast Asia to Europe, Latin America, and North America), less work has focused on the growing cultural and sociopolitical influence of overseas Chinese communities in West Africa. In 2007, Xinhua (New China News Agency) reported that an estimated 750,000 Chinese are working or living in Africa; overseas Chinese in Africa have been portrayed in the media as the latest wave of outsiders coming to Africa to extract natural and labor resources. They come not only as investors looking for new opportunities for expansion or engineers working the oil fields of the Sudan, but also as petty entrepreneurs starting trading companies, restaurants, pharmacies, and other businesses in what is portrayed as a “new frontier.” They also come as laborers, working for Chinese companies that are building new plants or infrastructural projects in Africa. Their presence sometimes creates resentment among local residents of African communities where Chinese immigrants have created their own communities, at times leading to kidnappings and violence as has happened in Nigeria and Ethiopia. In Ghana, their presence has been peaceful, though resentment of their affluence in their largely managerial or entrepreneurial roles is beginning to be voiced. This project seeks to ethnographically document the presence of overseas Chinese in Tema and other metropolitan areas of Ghana. The goals of this project are to collect demographic information on the overseas Chinese communities in Ghana to determine: more precise numbers of the Chinese population in Ghana; if there are particular Chinese localities or other demographic characteristics that are providing the bulk of overseas Chinese in Ghana; and Chinese attitudes towards their Ghanaians (and, correspondingly, Ghanaian attitudes towards the Chinese). Based on contacts that I developed with Chinese entrepreneurs in Tema and Cape Coast in the summer of 2008, I will select more informants based on snowball-sampling to gain access to overseas Chinese communities, and informal interviews, household surveys (if relevant), and other anthropological fieldwork based methodologies will be used to collect ethnographic data.

The comparative study of sports in China and the United States is uniquely positioned to shed light on the development and maintenance of civil society and the impact of globalization on local communities. In the case of China, using sports as a lens to see the emergence of civil society is especially timely and revealing. First, sports have become a major aspect of popular culture in postsocialist Chinese society beginning in the 1990s; sports-related industries, one of the fastest growing sectors of the rapidly growing Chinese economy, are projected for continued growth in light of the upcoming 2008 Olympics in Beijing. Second, sports comprise one area of popular culture where the state has allowed grass-roots organizations and media coverage to grow unimpeded; although the Chinese state has actively tried to censor politically-sensitive internet sites, sports-related communication has remained unconstrained, and both virtual and physical sports organizations have expanded. Third, despite its relatively liberal attitude towards sports, the Chinese state continues to be the primary organizer of sporting events and sports governing bodies, and sports continue to be closely linked to Chinese nationalism. As a result, sports organizations provide focused case studies for exploring the interpenetrated relationships between society and the postsocialist state, the growth of civic associations, and the development of a public sphere in China.
Sports in the United States are also especially relevant in exploring the health of American civil society. Robert Putnam cites the shift (where people are increasingly “bowling alone”) from participation to spectatorship in American sporting culture as weakening contemporary American civil society. In the early twentieth century, sports were considered by many American civic leaders to be a source of virtue, community-building, and a model citizenry; but at the dawn of the twenty-first century, with its bureaucratization and commodification, sports are increasingly considered a source of vice, materialism, and other social ills.
This research project seeks to determine the impact of sports and globalization on civil society by first mapping out the structural environment and cultural values of sports in Chinese and American local communities. Using social network analysis, the project will then compare Chinese and American ethnographic details to examine how sports differentially shape civil society in China and the United States. Contra Putnam, this project hypothesizes that the commodification, bureaucratization, and globalization of sports and popular culture do not atomize individuals in local communities, but rather through the transnational interconnectedness of sports organizations, these processes re-create deterritorialized interest-based communities that promote civic engagement in China and the United States.
Sports as popular culture shape the interactions between individuals and communities and between societies and nation-states through a particularly complex and layered set of processes, as will be detailed below in the theoretical discussion. Anthropological methodology that provides comparative, detailed, and empirically-based ethnographic accounts of the particularities of the social context and cultural practices are necessary for a deeper understanding of how sports shape contemporary social structure and local cultures.

Analysis of the social impact of computer technology has a particular edge due to the impact of hegemony-reinforcing political discourses on China. Despite the monumental works of China scholars like Needham, the absence of science, like the absence of capitalism, has justified Orientalist actions and attitudes towards China. Both internal (as seen in Maoist rhetoric) and external analysts have argued that Chinese culture itself is inimical to the development of science. For example, Richard Baum writes: “the institutionalization of the ethos of modern scientific rationalism in China is significantly impeded by the contemporary persistence of a number of atavistic cultural traits that have survived the passing of China’s traditional Confucian order” (1982: 1167). Science and technology studies (STS), a discipline that critically examines the social and cultural aspects of science and technology, is uniquely positioned to evaluate such issues in an emerging, postsocialist Chinese modernity.
In the case of China, science and technology, in particular, have been dominant parts of political thought in the history of twentieth century China. As Western imperialists further challenged Chinese sovereignty on the littoral (the areas most affected by contact with foreign people, ideas, and technology), “Mr. Science and Mr. Democracy” became a rallying symbol for reformers and revolutionaries of the early 20th century. The development of Western scientific institutions reflected wider shifts in Chinese society towards a new regime that was ultimately characterized by “scientific socialism.” Science and technology, as a discursive system, is of course a “cultural invention, in the sense that it brings forth a world; it emerges out of particular cultural conditions and in turn helps to create new ones” (Escobar 1994: 211). It is, however, a particularly powerful cultural invention because science and technology naturalizes its epistemological origins. The laboratory (or by extension the factory, the market, and other territorial spaces where scientific and technological knowledge is produced) is portrayed as an “objective space.” These spaces artificially reconfigure natural objects by transforming or making partial versions (reducing), taking it out of context, and controlling the timing of particular occurrences. Knowledge thus produced through the social institutions of science and technology asserts a universalistic applicability that masks the particular cultural conditions of scientists and technologists. People involved with computers and other information technologies can draw upon a universalizing authority seemingly empty of social and cultural particularities. The social and cultural outcomes of the localization of computer technology – such as the increasing stratification of economic and educational opportunities – are then justified as a necessary aspect of modernity.

As a result, I have conducted fieldwork research on technology and popular culture. To study technology, I examined a Hakka cyberspace community, the Hakka Global Network (a listserv), and other Hakka Internet resources illustrated how Hakka all over the world use the internet to shape ideas of what it means to be Hakka in the 1990s. I have continued this line of research through an examination of the computer industry (The Legend Group, aka Lenovo) and “Chinese cyberspace” in Shanghai.

This research started with my Ph.D. dissertation research. Based on extensive fieldwork in rural Guangdong and archival research, I examined how transnational processes shape social life in a local Hakka (a diaspora Chinese ethnic group) Catholic community. With the liberalization of the Chinese economy following the ascension of Deng Xiaoping to power in 1977, Chinese society has dramatically transformed nearly every aspect of everyday life. Many issues, such as the role of transnational religious organizations, continue to be contested both within China and between China and other nations as postsocialist structural adjustments mature. On one level, my research addressed the connection between a local, resurfaced Chinese Catholic Church to the global Church and how Catholicism is practiced under an avowedly atheistic political system that in the past (and to some extent today) has persecuted Catholics. On a more theoretical level, I explored what modernization and globalism mean to Hakka villagers in a remote area of southern China. A multiplicity of transnational processes – diasporic ethnicity, Catholicism, global capitalism, and popular media – converge in the social life of these villagers and are made local through a variety of social mechanisms that I explore throughout my dissertation. This ethnography was published by Stanford University Press in 2001.

Eriberto P. Lozada Jr. is a Professor of Anthropology and Environmental Studies, and Director of the Center for Interdisciplinary Studies. He is a sociocultural anthropologist who has examined contemporary issues in Chinese society ranging from: religion and politics; food, popular culture and globalization; sports and society issues; and the cultural impact of science and technology. more...

Essential Tools (mostly free) (Updated, 16 March 2017) Technological literacy (something I really need to define later) is essential to getting things done in today’s mediated world. There are a lot of useful applications out there that will cut back on the tears or punched walls late in the semester. Below are some of the […]

After reading Livestock’s Long Shadow, someone in the class asked about why the FDA allows antibiotics to be used in feed. By happenstance, I discovered a National Resources Defense Council brief that reviewed an FDA review of the safety of feed antibiotics that had been approved for ‘non-therapeutic use.’ FDA’s scientific reviewers’ findings show that […]